Transcript 57–Shel Silverstein, Part I

NOTE: This is a pre-production transcript and may not match the final show precisely.

Hello! You’ve done it again! You’ve found the next episode of
How Good It Is, a weekly podcast that takes a closer look at songs from the
rock and roll era, and we check out some of the stories behind those songs, and
the artists who made them famous.

My name is Claude Call, and that’s the name of that tune.

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Shel Silverstein was a multi-faceted entertainer who had a
wicked sense of humor. He often stylized himself as “Uncle Shelby”, and he’s
probably best known for writing poetry and books that are primarily aimed at
children. That said, he also wrote Uncle
Shelby’s ABZ Book, which looks like a kid’s alphabet book on its surface
but contains a bunch of really dark humor aimed at adults.

A lot of his work, though, has a silly tone to it but it’s
also earnest and, at times, pretty heartwarming. In fact, I dare you to read
his book The Giving Tree without
tearing up a little bit. Or a lot.

But Silverstein was also a gifted songwriter who’s
responsible for several pop hits, and we’re going to explore a few of them
today.

[A BOY NAMED SUE]

“A Boy Named Sue” was a huge hit for Johnny Cash when it was
released as a single from his 1969 album Live
at San Quentin. Silverstein said that he got the idea for the song from a
friend of his radio host and raconteur Jean Shepherd.

[SHEPHERD]

Now, if that voice sounds familiar and you didn’t grow up in
the New York Metropolitan Area listening to late-night radio, then you probably
recognize Shepherd as the narrator of the film A Christmas Story, for which he also wrote the original essays that
later became that movie. And like the boy named Sue, Shepherd was a guy who had
to deal with having kind of a girly name.

Silverstein’s nephew, Mitch Myers, said in an interview with
Songfacts.com that in those days in Nashville, when musicians got together
they’d often do something called a “Guitar Pull”, where you grabbed a guitar and played one of your new songs,
and then someone nearby would grab the guitar and play one of theirs, and so on
around the room. And Shel Silverstein was at a party and they were doing a
guitar pull, and Silverstein sang “A Boy Named Sue”. Now, June Carter Cash,
Johnny’s wife, thought it would be a pretty good song for Johnny to perform. It
wasn’t long after that, that they were scheduled to go record the show at San
Quentin, so she suggested that he bring the song along with him. So when Johnny
Cash performed “A Boy Named Sue” in front of that audience in San Quentin
Prison, he was playing it for the first time, reading the lyrics off a sheet of
paper sitting at the foot of the stage. And the band was pretty much making it
up on the spot. That single went to Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100 and
spent three weeks in that slot. It was, believe it or not, Johnny Cash’s only
appearance in the Top Ten for that chart. It was also a Top Ten hit in the UK
and in Canada, and Top 20 elsewhere in Europe and in South Africa. Not bad for
a first take!

Silverstein did his own recording of the song, and another
song in 1978 called “The Father of a Boy Named Sue”, which tells the same story
from the dad’s point of view. It’s even more of a spoken style than the
original was, and has minimal instrumentation, but it’s also pretty funny in
its own way.

[SYLVIA’S MOTHER]

Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show was a
band that got its name from the fact that they needed a name in a hurry for a
promoter, and as it happened one of the band members, Ray Sawyer, wore an
eyepatch after losing an eye in a car crash not long before the band got together.
It’s also a hipcheck to the Captain Hook character from Peter Pan, even though that particular Disney villain is neither a
doctor, nor does he wear an eyepatch. But band member George Cummings put
together a sign for the promoter reading “Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Tonic
for the Soul” and the name stuck. This also led people to believe that Ray
Sawyer, was, in fact, Dr. Hook himself, but when band members were asked who
Dr. Hook is, they’d usually point to the band’s bus driver.

The band had paired with Silverstein before they got their
record contract when they performed on a movie soundtrack he’d written, and in
fact he wrote all of the songs on their first album, titled simply Dr. Hook.

The first single off that 1972 album was this one, “Sylvia’s
Mother”, a parody of weepy teen heartbreak tunes, which is why lead singer
Dennis Locorriere is really pouring on the pathos as he sings. The record was a
flop at first, but Columbia Records put a little promotion behind it and it
managed to make it into the Top Five that summer. There are several sources
that say the song is actually autobiographical, relating the story of
Silverstein’s attempts to revive a failed relationship. The Sylvia in his case
spelled her name a little differently, and she did wind up getting married and
becoming a curator at a museum in Mexico City. Silverstein added a little extra
tragedy to the song by having Sylvia being pretty much in the same room with
her mother near the end, and the mom pretending to be talking to someone else.
Plus you’ve got the bit with the operator breaking in repeatedly to get the
singer to put more money in the pay phone.

Incidentally, country artist Bobby Bare recorded a cover that
same year that went to Number 12 on the Country charts, and that led to his
recording an entire album of Silverstein songs a few years later.

[COVER OF ROLLING STONE]

Later that year, Dr. Hook did another album of songs written
by Silverstein, called Sloppy Seconds.
That album yielded the band’s third single and their second big hit, “On the
Cover of Rolling Stone,” which again had a satirical angle to it. This time
around, the gag was that a band wasn’t truly successful until they’d made the
cover of that magazine, and never mind all the other legends attached to being
a rock star, such as drugs, groupies, and the insertion of a weird little guitar
solo accompanied by someone shouting ROCK AND ROLL!

By the way, while the band sings it as “Cover of THE Rolling
Stone”, the title in fact is just “Cover of Rolling Stone.”—no “the”. But
you’ll see it written both ways, so no harm/no foul, I guess. Oh—and while
we’re at it, when the song was near its peak on the charts in March of 1973,
Rolling Stone Magazine decided to give Dr. Hook their wish, sort of. The band
did, in fact, appear on the magazine’s cover, in a cartoony caricature image
and with the headline “What’s-Their-Names Make the Cover.”

The song has been covered several times, and it got a little
new life breathed into it when it was used in the 2000 film Almost Famous. Now, if you’re in the UK
you may have heard a slightly different version of the song. The BBC refused to
play the song because of their prohibition against commercial products
appearing on the air. So the story goes that the band went into the studio and
re-recorded it as “Cover of the Radio
Times”, which is the BBC’s programming guide, but the truth is, a bunch of
DJs went into a studio with the original recording and just shouted “RADIO
TIMES” over every point where the band sings “Rolling Stone.” So you can still hear the band singing “Rolling
Stone” faintly in the background.

Listen carefully:

[RADIO TIMES]

This version did not, however, make the charts there, though it did get some airplay.

OK, I’m going to do one more for today, and I have to admit
that when I was researching this week’s episode, this one came as a little bit
of a surprise for me.

[THE UNICORN]

Although, in retrospect, it’s not really that big of a
surprise. Silverstein wrote “The Unicorn” in 1962 for his album Inside Folk Songs, and it became a huge
hit, and the signature song, for the Irish Rovers in 1968. The idea behind the
song is that unicorns aren’t a myth, but a real animal that somehow managed not
to make it onto Noah’s Ark in time to be saved from the Biblical Great Flood.
So the unicorn literally missed the boat on their own existence. The record
made it into the Top Ten in both the US and in Ireland—go figure—and I hear
that it can still be heard with great regularity in Irish pubs to this day. You
can also see the lyrics written as a poem in Silverstein’s book Where the Sidewalk Ends.

And, that’s it for this edition of
How Good It Is, but we’re not done with Shel Silverstein. We’re going to return
to him a few episodes down the road.

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Next time around, we’re going to find out How Good It Is to
dine at Alice’s Restaurant.

Liner Notes

Theme music is “Surfing Day” by Marcos H. Bolanos, from his album Unchained Melodies, Vol.2, available at this site, and licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. And I hope I did that correctly.

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